The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#24751
Paul R. Rosenbaum
#24762
Overall Influence
Paul R. Rosenbaum is the Robert G. Putzel Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked from 1986 through 2021. He has written extensively about causal inference in observational studies, including sensitivity analysis, optimal matching, design sensitivity, evidence factors, quasi-experimental devices, and the propensity score. With various coauthors, he has also written about health outcomes, racial disparities in health outcomes, instrumental variables, psychometrics and experimental design.
Go to Profile#24752
Lawrence Wright
#24763
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally...
Go to Profile#24753
Mark Millar
#24764
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Mark Millar is a Scottish comic book writer and producer who first came to prominence with a run on the superhero series The Authority, published by DC Comics' Wildstorm imprint. Millar has written extensively for Marvel Comics, including runs on The Ultimates, which has been called "the comic book of the decade" by Time magazine and described as a major inspiration for the 2012 film The Avengers by its screenwriter Zak Penn, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Avengers for Marvel's Ultimate imprint, as well as Marvel Knights Spider-Man and Wolverine. In 2006, Millar wrote the Civil War mini-series th...
Go to Profile#24754
Avigdor Shinan
#24765
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Professor Avigdor Shinan is professor emeritus in the departments of Hebrew Literature, Yiddish and Comparative Jewish Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shinan has served as head of the departments of General Studies, and of Hebrew Literature and as Dean of The Hebrew University. He has served as visiting professor at Yale, JTS, and Yeshiva University and has also taught at Ben-Gurion, Tel-Aviv, and at the Schechter Institute.
Go to Profile#24755
A. Bernard Ackerman
#24766
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Albert Bernard Ackerman, M.D. was an American dermatologist and pathologist who was "a founding figure in the field of dermatopathology." Early life and education Ackerman was born on November 22, 1936, one of three children of an orthodontist in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy and theology from Princeton University, he received his medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He had his residency training in dermatology at Columbia University, the University o...
Go to Profile#24756
Douglas Huebler
#24767
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist. Life and career Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II. After the war, funded by the GI Bill, Huebler earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Michigan, and later went on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. He worked for several years as a commercial art illustrator in New York as he established himself as an artist.
Go to Profile#24757
Scott Sandage
#24768
Overall Influence
Scott A. Sandage is a cultural historian at Carnegie Mellon University. He is best known as the author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, which was selected as an "Editor's Choice" book by Atlantic Monthly, and was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best "first book" accepted by Harvard University Press. In 2007 he was named as one of America's Top Young Historians by the History News Network.
Go to Profile#24758
Huw Pill
#24769
Overall Influence
Huw Pill is a Welsh economist, and the chief economist of the Bank of England since September 2021, succeeding Andy Haldane. Pill studied philosophy, politics and economics at University College, Oxford, and graduated in 1989. He earned a doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1995.
Go to Profile#24759
Torbjörn Caspersson
#24770
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Torbjörn Oskar Caspersson was a Swedish cytologist and geneticist. He was born in Motala and attended the University of Stockholm, where he studied medicine and biophysics. Contributions Caspersson made several key contributions to biology.In the 1934 he and Einar Hammarsten showed that DNA was a polymer. Previous theories suggested that each molecule was only ten nucleotides long.He provided William Astbury with well prepared samples of DNA for Astbury's pioneering structural measurements.In 1936, in his doctoral thesis in chemistry, presented at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he f...
Go to Profile#24760
Gary Carter
#24771
Overall Influence
1954 - 2012 (58 years)
Gary Edmund Carter was an American professional baseball catcher whose 19-year Major League Baseball career was spent primarily with the Montreal Expos and New York Mets. Nicknamed "the Kid" for his youthful exuberance, Carter was named an All-Star 11 times, and was a member of the 1986 World Series Champion Mets.
Go to Profile#24761
Martin Kay
#24772
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Martin Kay was a computer scientist, known especially for his work in computational linguistics. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961. In 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, one of the earliest centres for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961, he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, US, where he eventually became head of research in linguistics and machine translation. He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#24762
Donald E. Stokes
#24773
Overall Influence
1927 - 1997 (70 years)
Donald E. Stokes was an American political scientist and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Stokes was a founder of public opinion research, and a coauthor of the seminal book The American Voter.
Go to Profile#24763
Jože Toporišič
#24774
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Jože Toporišič was a Slovene linguist. He was the author of the most influential Slovene scientific grammar of the second half of the 20th century, a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and coauthor of the Academy's Slovene Normative Guide . In this position, he transformed the linguistic section of the academy into the central regulatory authority for codification of Slovene.
Go to Profile#24764
Frank Oz
#24775
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Frank Oz is an American actor, retired puppeteer, and filmmaker. He is best known for his involvement with Jim Henson and the Muppets, Star Wars, as well as his directorial work in feature films and theater.
Go to Profile#24765
Franco Parisi
#24776
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Franco Aldo Parisi Fernández is a Chilean business engineer and economist. He received recognition for doing radio and television programs about economy along with his brother Antonino Parisi, and has been nicknamed "the economist of the people". In 2012 he launched his independent candidacy for president for the 2013 elections in Chile. Parisi ideologically identifies himself as a social liberal. In November 2021 he reached the third place of votes in the first round of the presidential elections, behind José Antonio Kast and Gabriel Boric.
Go to Profile#24766
Marko Kravos
#24777
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Marko Kravos is a Slovene poet, writer, essayist and translator from Trieste, Italy. He was born in Montecalvo Irpino, a small village in the Southern Italian region of Irpinia, where his family was sent to confination by the Italian Fascist regime. He spent his childhood in Trieste, where he attended Slovene language schools. After graduating in Slavic philology at the University of Ljubljana in 1969, in Slovenia , he worked in several publishing houses in Trieste. He also worked as a Slovene language professor at the University of Trieste. Between 1996 and 2000, he served as president of th...
Go to Profile#24767
Avery Johnson
#24778
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Avery DeWitt Johnson is an American basketball television commentator and former player and coach who most recently served as head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide men's basketball team. He is currently an NBA and college basketball analyst for CBS Sports.
Go to Profile#24768
Dieter Claessens
#24779
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Dieter Claessens was a German sociologist and anthropologist. Life Returning as POW from the Soviet Union Dieter Claessens studied sociology, anthropology, and psychology in Berlin, where he got his doctorate from the Freie Universität in 1957. He took his sociological post-doctoral degree from the University of Münster, where he was called to a Chair of Sociology in 1962. 1966 he returned as professor to the Free University, and retired there 1986, continuing his research work until his death in Berlin, 1997.
Go to Profile#24769
Abraham Beame
#24780
Overall Influence
1906 - 2001 (95 years)
Abraham David Beame was an American accountant, investor, and Democratic Party politician who was the 104th mayor of New York City, in office from 1974 to 1977. As mayor, he presided over the city during the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, when the city was almost forced to declare bankruptcy.
Go to Profile#24770
Tom Clark
#24781
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer. Education and personal life Clark was born on the Near West Side of Chicago, and attended Fenwick High School in Oak Park. After high school, he attended the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award for poetry. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to undertake graduate study at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in England , before spending further time pursuing doctoral research at the newly-established University of Essex. It was while in Britain that Clark famously hitchhiked through Somerset in the company of Alle...
Go to Profile#24771
Misha Tsodyks
#24782
Overall Influence
Misha Tsodyks is a leading theoretical and computational neuroscientist whose research focuses on identifying neural algorithms underlying cortical systems and cognitive behavior. His most notable achievements include demonstrating the importance of sparsity in neural networks, describing the mechanisms of short-term synaptic plasticity and working and associative memory.
Go to Profile#24772
Conyers Herring
#24783
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
William Conyers Herring was an American physicist. He was a professor of applied physics at Stanford University and the Wolf Prize in Physics recipient in 1984/5. Academic career Conyers Herring completed his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1937, submitting a dissertation entitled On Energy Coincidences in the Theory of Brillouin Zones under the direction of Eugene Wigner. In 1946, he joined the technical staff of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he remained until 1978. Then, he joined the faculty at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#24773
Ana María Shua
#24784
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ana María Shua is an Argentine writer. She is particularly well known for her work in microfiction. Shua has published over eighty books in numerous genres including novels, short stories, microfiction, poetry, drama, children's literature, books of humor and Jewish folklore, anthologies, film scripts, journalistic articles, and essays. She has received numerous national and international awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is one of Argentina's premier living writers.
Go to Profile#24774
Leo Kuper
#24785
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Leo Kuper was a South African sociologist specialising in the study of genocide. Early life and legal career Kuper was born to a Lithuanian Jewish family. His siblings included his sister Mary , who in later life directed the Johannesburg Legal Aid Bureau.
Go to Profile#24775
James Heilman
#24786
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
James M. Heilman is a Canadian emergency physician, Wikipedian, and advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He encourages other clinicians to contribute to the online encyclopedia.
Go to Profile#24776
Thylias Moss
#24787
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Thylias Moss is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist and playwright of African-American, Native American, and European heritage. Her poetry has been published in a number of collections and anthologies, and she has also published essays, children's books, and plays. She is the pioneer of Limited Fork Theory, a literary theory concerned with the limitations and capacity of human understanding of art.
Go to Profile#24777
Tony Mowbray
#24788
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Anthony Mark Mowbray is an English former professional footballer who is currently the head coach of Sunderland. Mowbray played for Middlesbrough, Celtic and Ipswich Town as a defender. He began his coaching career with Ipswich Town and took his first managerial job at Scottish Premier League side Hibernian, where he won the Scottish Football Writers' Association Manager of the Year award in his first season. He moved on to West Bromwich Albion in 2006, where he won the Football League Championship in 2008, but then suffered relegation from the Premier League the following year. Mowbray was t...
Go to Profile#24778
Donald Sadoway
#24789
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Donald Robert Sadoway is professor emeritus of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a noted expert on batteries and has done significant research on how to improve the performance and longevity of portable power sources. In parallel, he is an expert on the extraction of metals from their ores and the inventor of molten oxide electrolysis, which has the potential to produce crude steel without the use of carbon reductant thereby totally eliminating greenhouse gas emissions.
Go to Profile#24779
Yanis Varoufakis
#24790
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 , a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. Previously, he was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis.
Go to Profile#24780
He Guanghu
#24791
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
He Guanghu is a Chinese scholar of philosophy of religion and Christian theology. He is considered one of the leading "cultural Christians" in China, intellectuals who see Christian culture as a key to rebuilding Chinese civilization.
Go to Profile#24781
Ricky Williams
#24792
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Errick Miron is an American former professional football player who was a running back for 11 seasons in the National Football League and one season in the Canadian Football League . After playing baseball and football at Patrick Henry High School in San Diego, California, Williams played college football for the Texas Longhorns, where he was a two-time unanimous All-American and won the 1998 Heisman Trophy. He broke the NCAA Division I-A records for career rushing yards and all-purpose yards during his senior season. He played minor league baseball in the Philadelphia Phillies farm system for four seasons during college.
Go to Profile#24782
James B. Pritchard
#24793
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
James Bennett Pritchard was an American archeologist whose work explicated the interrelationships of the religions of ancient Palestine, Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Pritchard was honored with the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in 1983 from the Archaeological Institute of America.
Go to Profile#24783
Ed Byrne
#24794
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Edward Cathal Byrne is an Irish actor and comedian. He has presented the British television shows Just for Laughs and Uncut! Best Unseen Ads, has been a guest on numerous television panel games and has appeared on a number of television cooking shows.
Go to Profile#24784
Carl Wunsch
#24795
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Carl Wunsch was the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, until he retired in 2013. He is known for his early work in internal waves and more recently for research into the effects of ocean circulation on climate.
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J. Kenneth Grider
#24796
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
J. Kenneth Grider was a Nazarene Christian theologian and former seminary professor primarily associated with the followers of John Wesley who are part of the Holiness movement. Biography Early life J. Kenneth Grider was born October 22, 1921, in Madison, IL to William Sanford and Elizabeth Grider. In 1948, he got a M.A. from the Drew University, Madison, New Jersey in 1950. In 1947, he graduated from the Nazarene Theological Seminary. He received his PhD from the University of Glasgow in 1952.
Go to Profile#24786
Terence Parsons
#24797
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Terence Dwight Parsons was an American philosopher, specializing in philosophy of language and metaphysics. He was emeritus professor of philosophy at UCLA. Life and career Parsons was born in Endicott, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester with a BA in physics. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1966. He was a full-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1965 to 1972, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1972 to 1979, at the University of California at Irvine from 1979 to 2000, and at the University of California at Los Angeles from 2000 to 2012.
Go to Profile#24787
Adriana Neumann de Oliveira
#24798
Overall Influence
Adriana Neumann de Oliveira is a Brazilian mathematician specializing in interacting particle systems, awarded by the L'Oréal-UNESCO Prizes for women in science in 2016. She is a professor in the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
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Mona Singh
#24799
Overall Influence
Mona Singh is a Professor of Computer Science in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Education Singh was educated at Indian Springs School, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was awarded a PhD in 1996 for research supervised by Ron Rivest and Bonnie Berger.
Go to Profile#24789
Gino Bartali
#24800
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Gino Bartali, , nicknamed Gino the Pious and Ginettaccio, was a champion road cyclist. He was the most renowned Italian cyclist before the Second World War, having won the Giro d'Italia twice, in 1936 and 1937, and the Tour de France in 1938. After the war, he added one more victory in each event: the Giro d'Italia in 1946 and the Tour de France in 1948. His second and last Tour de France victory in 1948 gave him the largest gap between victories in the race.
Go to Profile#24790
Persis Drell
#24801
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Persis S. Drell is an American physicist best known for her expertise in the field of particle physics. She was the director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 2007 to 2012. She was dean of the Stanford University School of Engineering from 2014 until 2017. Drell has been the Provost of Stanford University since February 1, 2017. She plans to step down as Provost at the end of September 2023, and will be replaced by Jenny S. Martinez, dean of Stanford Law School.
Go to Profile#24791
Trudy Mackay
#24802
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Trudy Frances Charlene Mackay is the director of Clemson University's Center for Human Genetics located on the campus of the Greenwood Genetic Center. She is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the genetics of complex traits. Mackay is also the Self Family Chair in Human Genetics and Professor of Genetics and Biochemistry at Clemson University.
Go to Profile#24792
Franz Wegner
#24803
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Franz Joachim Wegner is emeritus professor for theoretical physics at the University of Heidelberg. Education Franz Wegner attained a doctorate in 1968 with thesis advisor Wilhelm Brenig at the Technical University Munich with the thesis, "Zum Heisenberg-Modell im paramagnetischen Bereich und am kritischen Punkt" .
Go to Profile#24793
Andrea Smith
#24804
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Andrea Lee Smith is an American academic, feminist, and activist. Smith's work has primarily focused on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native American women. Formerly an assistant professor of American Culture and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she is also a co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the Boarding School Healing Project, and the Chicago chapter of Women of All Red Nations.
Go to Profile#24794
G. N. Devy
#24805
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ganesh Narayandas Devy is an Indian cultural activist, literary critic and former professor of English. He is known for the People's Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him. He is credited with starting the Bhaashaa research and Publication Centre. He writes in three languages—Marathi, Gujarati and English. His first full-length book in English is After Amnesia . He has written and edited close to ninety books in areas including Literary Criticism, Anthropology, Education, Linguistics and Philosophy.
Go to Profile#24795
Niu Jingyi
#24806
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Niu Jingyi was a Chinese biochemist. He was born on December 26, 1920, in Xinghua, Jiangsu. In 1942, he graduated from the chemistry department of the National Southwestern Associated University. He served as an instructor of Tsinghua University from 1946 to 1948. In 1948, he went to United States to study biochemistry at the University of Texas, five years later commenced doctor degree. In 1956, he came back to China.
Go to Profile#24796
K. T. Chandy
#24807
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
K. T. Chandy was an Indian management education administrator and business executive. He was the founder-director of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, the first Indian Institute of Management.
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Ali Rahnema
#24808
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ali Rahnema is an Iranian economist and historian. He is a professor of economics at the American University of Paris. Rahnema is the son of former Iranian diplomat and politician Hamid Rahnema. Education Rahnema has a BA from Lewis and Clark College, MA and MALD degrees from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, and a Doctorat de Troisième Cycle from the Université de Paris I - Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#24798
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
#24809
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer was an American novelist and poet who was a Professor of English at Brooklyn College for more than thirty years. She won numerous national writing awards and contributed book reviews for The New York Times.
Go to Profile#24799
Hauwa Ibrahim
#24810
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Hauwa Ibrahim is a Nigerian human rights lawyer who won the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize in 2005. Life Ibrahim was born in Gombe in 1968. She was trained to be a lawyer and was considered the first Muslim woman in Nigeria to achieve this distinction.
Go to Profile#24800
Ghada Karmi
#24811
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian-born academic, physician and author. She has written on Palestinian issues in newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Nation and Journal of Palestine Studies.
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